02/13/2017

On Should Ethics Professors Be Held to Higher Ethical Standards in Their Personal Behavior?

I think we can reasonably expect ethicists to shape and improve their personal behavior in a way that is informed by their professional ethical reasoning. This is not because ethicists have a special burden as exemplars but rather because it's reasonable to expect everyone to use the tools at their disposal toward moral self-improvement, at least to some moderate degree, or at least toward the avoidance of serious moral wrongdoing...If our ethicist knows that as soon as she reaches a demanding moral conclusion she risks charges of hypocrisy, then our ethicist might understandably be tempted to draw the more lenient conclusion instead. If we demand ethicists to live according to the norms they endorse, we effectively pressure them to favor lenient moral systems compatible with their existing lifestyles.--Eric Schwitzgebel Should Ethics Professors Be Held to Higher Ethical Standards in Their Personal Behavior? The Splintered Mind [Emphases in original]

Schwitzgebel and I have been fellow travelers in exploring to what degree the norms and morals we investigate and even come to endorse as professional philosophers should be the standard(s) we live by. That is, we resist the recurring tendency to accept unquestionably that our professional practice is an innocent game (I say 'innocent' because there are many games that demand from its practitioners to live according to their needs), and rather to turn it (reflexively) into an existential practice. Schwitzgebel has gone beyond my own musings on these matters by doing experimental work on the topic (I tend to confine myself to historical studies). We also agree that the question which gives Schwitzgebel's latest post its title is not exclusively moral nor individual he (correctly) points to the social, epistemic significance (and costs & benefits) of the nature of the answer. Schwitzgebel's post (go read the whole thing!) articulates and exhibits a kind of aporia about the question that appeals to my sensibility

Even so, Schwitzgebel and I have a different understanding of what is at stake in answering the question.

My starting point -- and this is quite evidently not Schwitzgebel's -- is that moral philosophy has a real impact on policy and policyscience and a variety of 'applied' ethics practice (medical ethics, professional ethics, just war theory, etc.). In this respect, professional moral philosophy is no different from other practices that we come to understand as policy relevant science. The imperfect and partial translation or transference of bits of moral philosophy into policy is a complex and diffuse (and often opportunistic) process in which some moral philosophers are not innocent bystanders but major agents. (The diffusion also goes in the other direction, the range of problems and topics that are deemed important as well data/social science theories that matter, etc. are not merely given.) There are also be non-moral philosophers who play an important role (journalists, politicians, donors, grant agencies, various institutions)--the ecology is complex and there is a lot of local detail.

In my view (see my piece with Lefevere), within any professional community there are so-called Aggregators, who function as gate-keepers within the community (and whose proteges get influential positions) as well as agents that partially represent the community within policy environments and public opinion. Not all Aggregators perform all roles at the same time, and not all Aggregators are in all respects the intellectual leaders or trend-setters of the community. Among contemporary moral philosophers famous Aggregators include (just to offer some examples) Peter Singer, Thomas Pogge, Martha Nussbaum, Norman Daniels, and Jeff McMahan. Obviously, your list is allowed to be different! To be sure, not all influential moral philosophers take on the role of Aggregator within the profession or as a conduit to the world of policy, but quite a few do.

The role of Aggregators is, in part, epistemic and, in part, political. They represent the insights and understanding of the profession and also are, fairly or not, representative, exemplars of it within the profession and without. Aggregators tend to be powerful within the profession, and (without exaggerating their public influence) in virtue of their professional accomplishments also consequential in the policy environment. There are considerations of public prudence that enter into the evaluation of and expectations on Aggregators, who are subject to all kinds of temptations from massaging their message (or selling out) to taking advantage of various 'success goods.' Because considerations of prudence tend to be situational, I tend to constrain them in light of an appeal to integrity (which is a mixture of coherence, substantive norems, and role-relative demands).

Philosophical integrity is the way(s) in which one's professional arguments, professional credit, and public utterances and comportment cohere. The idea behind it is simple: it is meant to capture the thought that there is an intimate relationship (perhaps one of partial identity or accountability) between our words and our professional character; that there is some relationship between our lived experience and 'our' disembodied arguments. The nature and content of philosophical integrity is different for different kinds of philosophers--not all of us have a non-professional, public profile; not all of us theorize about (the possible) world(s) we inhabit.

One important fact about philosophical integrity is that it is context sensitive. It also accommodates those who wish to keep their distance from or frown on a moralized conception of professional life--their philosophical integrity will be constituted by practices that can deviate significantly from such mores. But we live in a public culture in which sincerity is a dominant (even exaggeratedly dominant) virtue. In fact, sincerity may well be thought to trump [sic] any other virtues. In such an environment, hypocrisy is, in fact, a deadly sin. I recognize that Schwitzgebel is right to wish to be extremely cautious about charges of hypocrisy. As he writes, "If we expect high consistency between a professional ethicist's espoused positions and her real-world choices, then we disincentivize highly demanding or self-sacrificial conclusions." My way to respond to this concern is that such a demand for high consistency is increasingly unavoidable for the Aggregating professional ethicist. But it does not follow that it is necessary for all professional ethicists.

In fact, there is lurking in my analysis here a commitment to epistemic pluralism in which we can get to keep the epistemic cake that Schwitzgebel wishes to eat [see this useful piece by Ryan Muldoon], by insisting that some (non-Aggregating) professional moral philosophers may live a life of doctrinal experimentation in word (without adjusting their deeds), while others can explore these very same doctrines in word and deed. In fact, one can maintain one's (less demanding) professional integrity, by merely experimenting in word if one has the right meta-philosophical stance toward words (e.g., it's just a low stakes game) [recall this post;and this one.] On my understanding of professional Aggregators they have a role to play (as thought leaders and gate-keepers within the profession) to maintain the right epistemic, professional structure within it such that this kind of experimentation occurs (and we don't fall into epistemic stagnation or fragility).

So, given the world we live in, I think it is no-brainer that professional Aggregators have to live lives of philosophical and professional integrity. (Considerations of integrity can also be applied to the character of the whole community, but that's not the present topic.) If they promote higher ethical standards (not all need to do so), then it is reasonable to "demand that they also behave according to higher ethical standards." It does not follow, however, that their professional and philosophical integrity are the only relevant standard. For, their integrity (and the standards of evaluation presupposed in it) may not cover all the relevant moral and prudential considerations. For example, a lot of professional Aggregators are tempted by and, perhaps, selected for technocratic approaches to political life in which the downside risks of implementation are (predictably) not properly captured by either the professional moral philosophical discussions or by the Aggregation mechanisms that are rewarded by the profession or society.

To put my disagreement (well, different emphasis) from Schwitzgebel in his vocabulary. I agree that the question he poses is "multi-dimensional." It follows that it does not have a univocal answer (that depends, in part, on one's role in the profession). But in my analysis I am also inclined to privilege a dimension -- the policy relevance of moral philosophy -- that Schwitzgebel tends to down-play such that the dimensionality of the problem is compressed a bit. So, for some ethicists their personal behavior just is political.

Comments

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Thanks for this interesting discussion, Eric. You're right that I didn't pay much attention to policy and community in that post -- and generally I've tended to focus less on policy and community in my work on moral psychology than on the individual and the individual's personal relationships.

Two thoughts I have in reaction:

1. I'm inclined to think this *adds* a dimension rather than compressing the dimensionality. Now we have, in addition to the four considerations of fairness, personal moral development, free exploration of demanding positions, and trying-out-by-living, a fifth one too: community-level considerations about the how policy-makers and the public will react to the behavior of Aggregators or philosophers with a prominent public profile.

2. Your post seems to depend on a difference between philosophers with a public profile and those without, and similarly between public behavior and private behavior. Of course it's a matter of degree, but I'm inclined to think that every university-employed ethicist is to some extent a public figure whose integrity will be scrutinized -- at least by their students if no one else (cf my cheeseburger ethicist in the dining hall). Likewise, even what I think of as private -- for example, how I behave with my spouse -- is to some extent discernible by others or might get out. If this is so, then all professional ethicists are in smaller or greater ways part of the public face of philosophy.